Harvesting techniques
Many different harvesting techniques are used depending on the place of sale, the type of crop and the stage of maturity of the crop to be harvested.
In the developing countries, most produce for internal rural and urban markets is harvested by hand where as sophisticated harvesting machinery will be limited for the most part to agro-industrial production of cash crops for processing or export or both. In most circumstances, hand harvesting, picking and catching methods cause less damage than mechanized techniques. Hand-harvesting is usual where fruit or other produce is at various stages of maturity within the crop, that is, where there is need for repeated visits to harvest the crop over a period of time e.g. roots and tuber crops, fruits and vegetables. Machine harvesting is usually viable only when an entire crop is harvested at one time.
Machine harvesting may improve quality over manual harvesting.